the New Pantagruel

Milosz’s Century

by Bruce Berglund

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.¹

ne of most important poets of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz, died on August 14, 2004, at age 93, in his home in Cracow. Milosz’s long life spanned nearly all of the past century, and the circumstances of that life brought him in contact with the century’s most destructive currents: nationalism, authoritarian ideology, genocidal violence. Born in a village in the Lithuanian countryside, the young Milosz traveled the Russian Empire with his father, a noble officer in the army of Tsar Nicholas. He studied law at the centuries-old university in Wilno (present-day Vilnius), one of the most ethnically mixed centers of the interwar Polish republic, a space in which faiths and tongues overlapped. Indeed, the environment of Wilno, with its diversity of languages, literatures, religions, and ideas, had profound effect on Milosz, and it remained throughout his life the ideal of what Europe could be.

He spent most of the war years in Warsaw, contributing as a writer and editor to underground publications. Day-to-day existence under the brutal German occupation plunged Milosz into spiritual crisis; he was shaken by what the noble schemes of the modern age had wrought and edged back toward the Catholic faith of his youth. He watched the fall of the Iron Curtain from a safer distance: in Paris, he served in the embassy of the postwar Polish government. As the Stalinist empire tightened its hold on Eastern Europe, he chose to remain in the West, staying first in Paris and then, after 1960, in Berkeley. Milosz’s reputation in the West was first established with his volume The Captive Mind (1953), one of the earliest exposés of Communist oppression in Europe. Other prose works followed—rigorous essays, an autobiographical novel, a portrait of his native Lithuania, a history of Polish literature, the diary of a year of his life—but it was for his corpus of poetry, written wholly in Polish (unlike Brodsky or Nabokov, Milosz never adopted for his pen the language of his exilic home), that Milosz earned the Nobel Prize in 1980.

Milosz’s career as a poet had begun in 1931, as a law student in Wilno, with a 20-year-old’s visions of a civilization on the brink of catastrophe, a scene of “machines throbbing quicker than the heart,” of “lopped-off heads” and “cats floating on their backs,” of red banners, military trains, and the cries of children.² A decade later in Warsaw, Milosz saw this vision come to life, as he witnessed firsthand the inhumanity that consumed 20th-century Europe. His wartime poetry offers scenes of the end of the world. It was not the end that Europeans had anticipated for centuries, an end announced by thunder and trumpets. Instead, the end had come while the world tended to its business. People remained absorbed in their individual lives, oblivious to the cosmic events around them. “No believes it is happening now,” he wrote in 1944.³ Even those amidst the carnage did not understand its weight:

They are dragging a guy by his stupid legs,
The calves in silk socks,
The head trailing behind.
And a stain in the sand a month of rain won’t wash away.
Children with toy automatic pistols
Take a look, resume their play.⁴

In his wartime writing, Milosz wrestled with the responsibility of being a poet—at the end of the world. What was his task? Was it possible to write verse that met the moral challenge of his times? “What is poetry that does not save/ Nations or people?” he asked in the poem “Dedication.”

A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.⁵

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